I recently purchased a Murena Fairphone 6. There were sacrifices I expected to be made in switching to a privacy-centric, de-Googled version of Android–but I didn’t expect group texting to be one of them. Turns out, group texting is broken, and it’s not Murena’s fault. You will suffer the same fate if you switch to any phone that doesn’t have Google Messages.
RCS is a lie
Rather than better texts, we get another siloed chat app
Credit: Joe Fedewa / How-To Geek
I don’t have any particular love for sending traditional SMS text messages. They don’t have read receipts. Sometimes messages fail to get delivered. The lack of encryption makes it easy for telecom providers and governments alike to snoop. It’s not possible to leave group chats once you’ve been added to one.
But there is a beauty to SMS. We can use whatever phone or text messaging app we want, and no one knows nor cares. Just like with email, it doesn’t matter what software you use. The message sent the same.
RCS changes things. It fixes all of those issues that I named about SMS, but you can’t use RCS with just any texting app. There are many texting apps I can download for my Fairphone 6 running /e/OS/ that can send SMS messages, but none of them support RCS–not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. RCS functionality requires carrier support or integration with Google’s Jibe backend.
Unfortunately, supporting RCS is more difficult than it sounds. The bigger OEMs don’t even ship texting apps with RCS support either. Even Samsung, the one company that did offer its own implementation, has pulled the plug on Samsung Messages and now recommends Google Messages instead. If you want to use RCS on Android, then you need to use Google Messages. Your only alternative in the US is to use iMessage, which is exclusive to iPhones.
Even if I install Google Messages on /e/OS/, it doesn’t work. As Android Authority previously reported, Google has been silently blocking RCS on rooted Android phones and custom ROMs, an important piece of information I missed ahead of time. I was aware that RCS is a walled garden, but I didn’t know it was this bad.
Google Messages has broken group chats
You just don’t realize it until you try to leave.
On new phones, RCS isn’t something you need to think about, since Google Messages enables it by default. Once your phone number gets registered with Google, it tells other phones that this is a device with RCS support. Conversations between two devices with RCS support will have all the bells and whistles that we’ve come to love. In group chats, this means you can see who’s typing, you can react to their messages with emoji, and you can choose to leave a group chat if you’ve had enough. RCS is even getting support for video calling.
If you switch to a phone that doesn’t have Google Messages, be that a de-Googled smartphone or a minimalist alternative like the Light Phone 3, you’re going to find that you suddenly stop receiving group chats. One-to-one SMS chats have come through for me with no problem, but group chats that were originally created with all members having RCS support continued to function as though all members still had RCS, even though I didn’t. I didn’t get any indication that someone tried to message me, and they didn’t get an indication that I wasn’t seeing their messages. It was a complete disaster of a situation with real-world implications.
My son’s teacher often updates parents via group text. I’ve already missed important information related to picking him up from school because I did not receive the text.
To mitigate this situation, you need to de-register your phone from RCS within Google Messages before shifting over your SIM. If you don’t do this beforehand, there’s a website where you can de-register from RCS instead. In either case, the change doesn’t necessarily kick in right away. It may even take weeks.
Here is just how broken things are
How is this even legal?
Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek
If I start a group chat on my end and message others, I can expect them to receive the MMS chat, but the conversation will remain one-sided—I won’t get their responses.
I have tried many variations to get a group chat functional again. If I grab my wife’s phone and have them leave the chat, their first message comes through as an MMS, but as soon as someone else in the group with an RCS phone responds, everyone else’s phones go back to treating that group message as an RCS thread, and I stop receiving any further messages.
I’ve read that the only way to fix this is to have everyone actively leave the chat and delete the conversation from their phones, losing all the history in the conversation. If I then recreate that brand-new group chat on my end, it will begin as an MMS-only thread. I cannot confirm if this works, because getting everyone to figure out how to leave the group and agree to delete it all at the same time while coordinating with me to be the one to create a new group chat is a logistical nightmare, even with my closest loved ones. It is an absolute non-starter for group chats involving looser connections, like those that my kids’ teachers send out to multiple families.
Then, in an extra level of spite, when I popped my SIM into a different phone that does have Google Play Services, the texts I missed over the past few weeks all suddenly appeared, quite spitefully, in the form of MMS texts with gibberish conversation names (pictured above).
It took me a long time to decide whether I would keep this phone. It feels like a shame to return a phone due to an issue that isn’t its fault, but Google’s.
We have long been able to buy any phone with the expectation that phone calls and text messages will go through. Now we live in a world where a phone that doesn’t come from Apple or ship with Google Play Services running in the background won’t be able to reliably communicate. Google has turned group text messaging from an open standard into yet another siloed chat app that, despite differences in the backend, is little different from using WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram—except compared to those apps, people are even less likely to understand when things go wrong.
Brand
Murena
Display
6.31 inches
The Murena Fairphone (Gen. 6) is the perfect option to bring together privacy and sustainability. Powered by the /e/OS operating system, the Fairphone (Gen. 6) protects you and your data at all times, while at the same time protecting the planet.
